Telstra users left holding exposed lines

By Nick Galvin

December 9, 2008 — 11.00am

THOUSANDS of Telstra customers are putting up with crude, temporary phone connections with cables held together by tape and plastic bags and strung along fences, across lawns and through trees. In many cases the unsightly - even dangerous - cables are left in place for months and even years, despite repeated pleas to finish the job by burying them.

Colin Barraclough has endured a temporary "lead-in" cable running from the street across the ground and over his garage for 18 months after a fault was patched up at his Greystanes home. His neighbour accidentally severed the connection with a hedge trimmer recently, leaving him without a phone for three days - but the line remains unburied.

"Every time I call I'm told that Telstra has more important and urgent work to do and I will just have to wait," he said. "I cannot be given a time frame as to when the cable will be buried. I might have to wait another 12 months."

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On the Central Coast, Robin Williams has put up with a temporary line since May. In that time she has tripped over it while recovering from eye surgery and her husband has accidentally cut it with a hedge trimmer.

"When I last contacted Telstra, I was told it … might be 12 to 18 months before anything was done," she said. "Even my suggestion that the temporary line could cause a serious accident counted for little, with one officer telling me I would just have to be careful. We are beginning to believe that Telstra has no intention of ever doing anything."

In West Pymble, at the home of Chris and Sandi Murray, a cable snakes across the public footpath, over the lawn and through bushes and trees before being linked to another cable with a splice protected by a plastic bag. Passers-by regularly trip over the cable, yet the Murrays still have no date for when the job will be completed.

"The phone just stopped working in January," Mrs Murray said. "I assumed it was going to be two weeks to a month maybe and then they would come back and fix it." Repeated calls and emails have met a blank wall. "I don't think Telstra has any answers really," she said.

These are just some of more than a dozen cases uncovered in a Herald investigation.

An aged pensioner in Glen Innes says he has had a 20-metre cable strung through a tree and along a fence and gutter for 12 years. A woman on a rural property in Jamberoo fears cows in a nearby paddock will be injured in a hole dug to accommodate a temporary cable. A customer in the Blue Mountains fears he may lose his connection at any moment, despite telling Telstra his wife is seriously ill.

Telstra Group's managing director for networks and services, Michael Rocca, was unwilling to say exactly how many temporary cables were in place around the country but claimed it was less than .04 per cent of the total of about 30 million - about 12,000.

"The percentage of [temporary] cables compared to the millions of cables we have is extremely small," he said, adding that once a complaint was logged, Telstra moved quickly to fix it.

"From time to time … you are going to have some of these temporary cables … We are not perfect - sometimes we do on odd occasion get things wrong - but as you can see from the figures, the overwhelming majority of times we provide service, we do it right for the customer."

Steve Dodd, the NSW branch assistant secretary of the Communications Plumbing and Electrical Union, claimed the problem was widespread because many of Telstra's "conduit workers", who were responsible for burying lines, had been made redundant.

"Now the team leaders have only got technicians who haven't even got a shovel in their bag," he said. "They write out a report saying there is substandard work that needs to be replaced - and that goes into a black hole."